Lost and found

By Helen Row Toews

June 7, 2018 10:12 AM

File Photo

We haven’t had water to wash clothes at our house lately which has forced me to bundle everything up in baskets and trundle it off to a laundromat. I like laundromats.
There’s something relaxing about slouching in a warm room with a good book and the continual hum of dryers.
It’s a rewarding experience, although I have to say I take a certain amount of undeserved flack over it.
My husband doesn’t trust me with his socks. Yes, you heard me – socks.
Personally I think he has a bit of a hang-up with the unassuming garment, but you can’t argue with City Hall.
He says I lose them, and I figure the whole issue is ridiculous.
If they go missing it’s nothing to do with me, but my protestations fall on deaf ears.
I tell him: maybe the machine consumed them for reasons of its own or perhaps the malodorous footwear wafted from the building on a cloud of fumes. Either way – not my problem.
Sometimes, weeks later, they turn up for no apparent reason at the bottom of his designated drawer or under the bed which, in some bizarre turn of events, is also my fault.
I bet the man owns over 40 sets of them anyway!
What’s one pair, more or less? In any case, each friendless sock ends up in my lost and found hamper, waiting indefinitely for its mate.
We have a lost and found bin at school too. Recently I saw our Vice Principal, Tina Pero, sorting through the abandoned articles flung within.
Carefully she folded each item neatly and laid it on a table so parents or children could easily retrieve their missing apparel.
A few mismatched mittens, several shapeless toques, endless numbers of hoodies and even an assortment of shoes were drawn forth and set aside to be showcased in the foyer.
However, it was as she held aloft a small pair of trousers that she paused and turned to me with a confused shake of her head and a bemused look in her eyes.
“I can understand losing a hat, some gloves, or a sweater,” she said, almost to herself as she grappled with this mystifying dilemma.
“What I don’t understand is how you can leave without your pants?”
She pulled out some jeans next, and brushed an imaginary speck of lint from one knee, “I mean, these were left during the winter. It was cold outside, right?
Who walks into the snow with bare legs?” She turned back to the tub and uncovered a third pair.
“Does this make any sense to you Helen? Seriously – does it?”
Not really expecting a reply for a riddle to which there was no solution, she continued in her self-appointed task, still muttering. “Pants? I just don’t get it…”
Some questions in life simply have no good answer.
We can’t know or comprehend why things are the way they are; our lot in life is to accept what we cannot change without endless, grudging complaint.
And so, with that in mind I say, “Get over it Tom.”

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